For the first few weeks of my internship, I focused on a project determining colony forming units at different bacterial  concentrations. This involved creating dilutions using a spectrophotometer, carefully using the micropipette and counting bacterial colonies. I developed this skill by repeating the procedure many, many times.

The button below will bring you to the Excel spreadsheet and graph summarizing my work and demonstrating my proficiency with this procedure.

The second project that I worked on involved repeated ELISA. This involved creating bacterial dilutions, using lab equipment to measure and working with timed procedures. After performing this procedure many times, I became comfortable creating bovine serum albumen (BSA) solutions and dilutions, ascertaining the efficacy of different antibodies and working with micropipettes. The photo in the left column of this page is the results of my last ELISA experiment, comparing the Fitzgerald and 55 antibodies on different bacterial strains and concentrations.

This skill is definitely more of a "soft skill" than the first two that I listed, but that doesn't make it any less important. While I had worked in many teams before, such as my a cappella group and my nutrition research team, I had not experienced what teamwork in a biology/engineering lab looked like before my Novus Diagnostics internship. While working at Novus Diagnostics, I worked closely with my supervisors to determine the best next steps after an experiment finished, and I worked with my fellow intern to troubleshoot our own experiments, as we were both new to the lab.